Vienna
THERE ARE MOMENTS IN LIFE we should be able to relive time and time again, whenever, wherever, and however we choose. I remember it well—the moment we met in Vienna, after the war, on that warm autumn day in 1918. What I don’t remember is exactly how I arrived there with my leg so badly wounded that the doctor caring for me said it would take a miracle to save. And there was Juan, my sister’s husband (you remember Sonia and Juan), who took me in his cart from Carinthia to my mother’s home in Salzkammergut near Lake Grundlsee, where we spent the summer.
That long, hot summer was when I met Margarete. One of my mother’s sisters (was it Hedda?) introduced us at the farmers’ market. She was slender, quite plain, and shy to a fault. If I must be honest, at first glance, I mistook her for a young man. Not that she wasn’t attractive—she was, in a handsome sort of way, like the women I had seen in Paris and Monte Carlo. But her long trousers and the rolled-up sleeves of her wrinkled shirt reminded me of how my father looked after long days at his factory.
Once my initial impression yielded to better judgment, I couldn’t stop myself from falling in love with her. Strangely enough, it was the first time I had ever fallen in love. But not Margarete. She had met Anton at the Kunstgewerbeschule, where she had spent the last six months studying architecture, freeing herself from the grip of her controlling mother and an inebriate stepfather who would ridicule her and her mother before passing out in his chair by the fireplace.
Her relationship with Anton was doomed from the start. He was not only her teacher and considerably older but also married to the daughter of the local police commissioner. Confronted about his philandering, he was forced to prioritize his family over his personal desires.
Thinking about it now, after all these years, I realize Margarete never loved me the way I loved her. For her, it was a passing fancy, a distraction from the anguish of losing the man she truly loved—the man whose child she would bear that coming spring. When we made love for the first time, she wept, calling them tears of joy. But now I understand they were tears of profound sadness. I was too young and too naive to recognize that she needed comfort, not my self-indulgent declarations of love.
We spent that summer inseparable. We swam naked in the lake, made love in the fields of Katrinalm, and stole sweet Kaiserschmarrn from my aunt’s kitchen. We wandered hand in hand through the cobblestone streets of Hallstatt, a village I have never revisited in my futile attempt to erase the memory of the love I lost within its walls.
On one of the most beautiful summer mornings I can recall, Margarete woke me with a flourish of kisses. We made love, bathed in the golden rays filtering through the dusty slats of the Venetian blinds, while a cool breeze whispered through the open window. Later, as we lay entangled, she looked at me with teary eyes and told me she wanted to be with me forever. She said that when she passed from this world, she wanted mine to be the last face she saw, the last lips she kissed. Those were her exact words.
That same morning, as we sat overlooking the lake, finishing a late breakfast, she excused herself to fetch something from our room before our walk. When she did not return after ten minutes, I went up to find she was gone. Vanished. Not a trace. As if she had never been there at all. I never saw Margarete again.
Years later, I read in the newspaper that she had married the architect Wilhelm Schütte in 1927. He revitalized her, inspired her, and financed her early career. She designed a series of schools around Vienna, based on the ideas of Maria Montessori. Margarete died in Vienna in 2002, just days before her 103rd birthday—more than forty years after my own passing.
I spent the rest of that summer recuperating from my broken heart at my mother’s house. I filled the long days with reading, helping with accounting, and spending weekends with my father when he returned from Vienna. Those are my only memories of him—his constant coming and going, his endless work to keep his factory alive after losing half his workforce to the war. It killed him at forty-six.
As summer faded, I returned to Vienna with my sister, who had taken a job as a governess for the daughters of a wealthy widow. I had planned to apprentice as a chef at Griechenbeisl, one of Vienna’s oldest restaurants, before managing one of my mother’s hotels in Linz. But my sister’s employer suddenly needed a cook, and I took the job.
That was how I met Beatrix Roth—the barefoot wealthy widow of Vienna (as she was known). She ran a sprawling estate, was mother to two daughters, and had two albino Greyhounds who dozed beneath the golden leaves of a Ginkgo Biloba tree. She also never wore shoes—a tribute to her late husband, whose corpse had been returned from war barefoot, his boots stolen. Even at his funeral, she removed the new shoes placed on his feet and gave them to a soldier whose own boots were in tatters.
By the end of that unforgettable day in her garden, Beatrix convinced me to stay. I became what she called the culinary director of her household, though, in truth, I was little more than an overpaid cook with my initials embroidered on a starched white uniform.
But my time in her home was brief. We fell in love and married in the very garden where we first met. A year later, our daughter, Abigail, was born. And just fourteen months after that, in the heat of July 1922, Beatrix and her children were found dead in our bedroom, Abigail clutching a ragdoll at her mother’s feet.
They were poisoned. And I was blamed.
I was sentenced to thirty years of hard labor. I lost the woman I loved, the children who were as dear to me as my own blood, and worst of all, I lost Abigail. The thought of never seeing her again nearly drove me mad.
I was imprisoned in Suben Abbey until the end of World War II. Then, in March 1945, Karl, the illegitimate brother of Beatrix’s first husband, confessed to her murder just hours before he was hanged for his crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. He had betrayed his own brother during the war, conspiring to claim Beatrix and her wealth. When she rebuffed him, he killed her.
After my release, I moved to Granada, Spain, to be near Abigail, who had been raised by my sister. I lived out my days in a small but sunlit apartment in the barrio de Zaidín.
On June 20, 1963, I had dinner with my family. I returned home, turned on the radio, and sat in my favorite chair, looking out into the tranquil, moonlit night. I thought of Beatrix, as I did every night. As I closed my eyes for the last time, I remembered her face, her silky hair brushing against me as we made love. I could almost smell her breath, taste her lips. Then, in my mind’s eye, I saw the last time I had seen her—lifeless on our bedroom floor, the moment my world stopped turning.
I did not fulfill my vow to bring her killer to justice—God saw to that. But I did keep my most important promise. That one day, we would be together again. In Vienna.